The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  “When we would fly from Atlanta overnight to California, he normally wouldn’t play the next day. We did a cross-country trip to San Francisco one time and when we got there there was a newspaper article in the San Francisco Chronicle about this ‘Count’ Montefusco, a young pitcher, maybe twenty-two years old,” recalled Davey Johnson, then a Braves infielder. “He had great stuff, a nasty slider—an unhittable slider. He was complaining that he was having to pitch against the Braves. He said something like ‘They’re not a good team; why am I pitching against them?’ And Henry read the paper and he went to [Clyde King] and said, ‘I’m in the lineup.’ And it was a day game after an all-night flight. I’ll never forget it. We all knew what was going to happen. We’d seen it too many times. A couple of guys got on base in front of him and Henry looked for his best pitch, which was a nasty down-and-away slider. He reached out there and popped it over the left center-field wall. He came back into the dugout and said, ‘I hope that kid gained more respect for us now.’ Henry put him in his place. This kid was cocky. He had a really great year and felt above pitching against any club. That’s what Henry said, ‘We can’t let this go.’ And I mean to tell you, it was a wicked low-and-away slider. That was in 1974, Montefusco’s first year.”

  Johnson could be forgiven for flashbulb memory, but the kernel of the story is nevertheless true. The game was September 18, 1974, the finale of a three-game set in San Francisco. It was true that Henry did not usually play in the opener of a West Coast series following a cross-country flight, nor did he play in this case: a day-game travel day following a night game. John Montefusco woke him, and Henry had been scheduled an off-day but put himself in the lineup. Montfusco was a rising star, twenty-four years old. He had been called up fifteen days earlier and the next year would win Rookie of the Year in the National League.

  Henry led off the second, and boomed home run number 732 off Montefusco, a long, slashing drive to left center. In his next at-bat, with two on in the third, Henry singled home another run off Montefusco. Henry had put the kid down, but what didn’t make sense was why Montefusco would want to upset any opponent, as the Giants would finish sixteen games behind the Braves in 1974. Pressure was like the wind, unseen by the human eye, but it could easily and obviously be detected when it descended, exerting its suffocating, downward force. The pressure Henry felt stemmed not only from his inability to catch a fastball but from why he couldn’t. The truth was that he had indeed started the marathoner’s kick to get to Ruth, gave it everything he had and soared at an age when so many of his contemporaries were washed up. Between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine, Mays had wilted as a baseball player. So had Frank Robinson and the rest of them. But Henry had hit 199 home runs, so suddenly, at age forty, it did not compute that the skill was no longer there. Even when he was hitting under .200, his strikeout totals were still low, and that was all the more reason for him to believe that he suffered from mechanical flaws more than from physical erosion.

  In the years to come, with reflection, Henry understood the reasons were not mostly physical (other than that the nagging aches persisted a bit longer), but mental: There was, after Ruth, nothing left to chase. For five years, Ruth had been the obsession, and for the ten before that, the goal had been to prove he belonged with Mays, Mantle, and Musial, on the red carpet with the all-time greats, the ones who defined Cooperstown, instead of the other way around, and during his initial five years in the big leagues, the motivating force had been proving to himself that there was a bigger, more rewarding life beyond Mobile in which he was entitled to share. He would say he always believed he would quit the game after he had achieved three thousand hits, but the proximity to Ruth kept him going, five years after that milestone. He had wanted desperately for the chase to be over, to put an end to the pressures and the anxieties and the fears. Billye and his closest friends would spend the next three decades trying to repair the blows to his humanity that had been exacted during the chase. “There is no question he lost something253 he could never get back, a piece of himself,” said his close friend and attorney, Allan Tanenbaum. “The chase did that.”

  But now that the record belonged to him, Henry realized how much the goal of vanquishing Ruth had gotten inside of him. He had weakened as a complete player since 1968, harassed by his back, his ankles, all the parts of his body that hurt. He had stolen at least fifteen bases a year for nine straight seasons, but since turning thirty-five in 1969, he hadn’t stolen ten in a single season, and would not again. He did not know what would provide the inner motivation to continue playing ball.

  For a time, it appeared that the pennant race would energize him. In the month before the all-star break, the Braves contended with the Reds and Dodgers, both hungry, muscular clubs. June 21, opening game of the series at Riverfront Stadium, Carl Morton against Jack Billingham: The two traded zeroes until the seventh, when Henry stroked a one-out double and later scored on a ground ball. The rest was tension, the Big Red Machine loading the bases in the bottom of the ninth, Tom House facing the murderous Johnny Bench for the game. Bench flied out to left, and the Braves took a 1–0 win. They were in second place, only five games behind Los Angeles and two ahead of Cincinnati. The Braves were making a pennant run, and it was Henry who had scored the only run of the game. Intermittently in 1974, he had spoken of retirement, but maybe there was some fun to be had after all, one last charge. Phil Niekro, the other old head on the club (even Niekro, who looked like he was seventy even when he was in his thirties, was five years younger than Henry), led the pitching staff. The kid Buzz Capra was surprising the league at 7–2, and that self-described “low-end guy, happy to be there” Tom House possessed a microscopic ERA. Where there was pitching, there was October, so even though he was no longer as dangerous, Henry somehow still found himself in the middle of big wins as the summer progressed.

  A month later, the day before the all-star break, Dock Ellis beat the Braves 6–2 at Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium, and the only thing October signified to any of the long faces on the bench was uninterrupted fishing trips. The Braves had lost twenty-two of their previous thirty-three games, their record plummeted to a mediocre 50–49—a hearty fifteen games out of first—and the smiles disappeared. The loss also spelled curtains for Eddie Mathews, who, following the final out of Ellis’s complete game five-hitter, was fired before he could leave the building.

  Out of the race, Henry would then have to generate his own fuel, and that was precisely the problem. The ghost of Ruth had been vanquished, and even his personal life had grown normal once again. He and Billye began to sow philanthropic seeds in Atlanta, forming charitable foundations and working with others. Gaile returned to school, largely without incident, and during the early afternoons before night games it was a common occurrence to see Henry, in turtleneck and plaid pants, leaning on the fence at Marist High School, watching Henry Aaron, Jr., play linebacker on the school football team.

  Henry had even outlasted most, if not all, of his contemporaries. Mays had gone, quietly, the last hit of his career driving in the go-ahead run in the twelfth inning of the second game of the 1973 World Series against Oakland, partial redemption for the moment that would become the universal, chilling reminder for gods who can’t quit: falling down in the outfield while chasing Deron Johnson’s liner in the bottom of the ninth. Ernie Banks had retired in 1971. Mantle and Drysdale had been gone six years, Koufax nearly ten. Robinson and Clemente were dead, and Frank Robinson was at the end—it was heavily rumored that he would become the first black manager in the game at season’s end. Even the roaring lion Gibson had already announced that 1975 would be his final year. The old foes were gone, and spiraling out of the race had cost his old comrade Eddie Mathews his job. Henry had already achieved every important milestone in the sport, had, in the words of Dusty Baker, broken a record every time he climbed out of bed, and had caught every standard-bearer against whom he had once measured himself. Stan Musial’s National League record of 3,630 hits wa
s within striking distance, but once Ruth’s record was already under glass, rapping out singles to pass Musial lacked the requisite emotional punch. There was nothing else for Henry to do in the game.

  THE SIGNS WERE everywhere, and had been since the beginning of spring, when he announced that 1974 would be his final year, that the end of Henry’s career possessed the potential for trouble between him and the Braves, the kind of trouble that could sour a legacy. One such warning signal was that Henry was hitting less often but challenging the baseball establishment more. He was the home-run king and, he later said, believed he had accrued the appropriate political capital to press for rights. But there was the delicate matter of just how the Braves felt about him as a player. His contract was up at the end of 1974 and the Braves had not initiated any discussions about renewing it. Part of the reason for this was that Henry had said during spring training he believed he would retire after the 1974 season. There were words of surprise and encouragement when Henry mentioned quitting, but no one in the Braves management really pulled on his emotional coattails to coax him to stay, and they certainly did not offer him a contract for 1975. He had become that Gibraltar of professional sports—the aging superstar too big, too accomplished, and too familiar and popular with the fans to be casually cast aside simply because his skills had eroded. History had shown that these endings were rarely resolved well. Ruth left the Yankees with an unrequited longing to manage and a sagging belly. Robinson left the Dodgers with bitterness that so heroic a journey could culminate in such cynicism, while Mays left the Giants ragged and hollow. By voluntarily retiring, Henry was following the Ted Williams model, walking away unlined, indomitable. No one in management wanted to say it, but, by retiring, Henry was solving a potentially messy problem for the Braves.

  Into the season, he slogged his way through the .200s and took more days off (day games following night games, mostly and Sunday get-aways to let his body regenerate) as the club began drifting toward the future, a future that for the first time since he became the Rookie Rocket did not include him. When any chance of winning the pennant was beaten out of them during that heinous July, the end of the Aaron era became merely a matter of ripping days off of the summer calendar.

  It was precisely during this time that Henry began to change his mind about the future. He had always said he would not be the ballplayer who quit only after he looked ridiculous on the field, but neither could he quite stand the idea of walking away in the grips of his mortality. Maybe he did not want to quit after all, not with a .225 batting threatening to be his final memory of wearing a big-league uniform. Maybe he would shake the tempting hand of Faust and enter into the same fatal deal that had finished other athletes, from ballplayers to boxers: He would tell himself that he would be the one who could deny time. He would say nothing, but his mind was changing about playing in 1975; he was giving himself one more chance to leave the game on top.

  If the Braves were willing to reassess and allow Henry to return to the team in 1975 (and there was no evidence that they were), the series of simmering events at the end of the July appeared to end his relationship with the organization. Soon after Mathews was fired, Frank Hyland of the Journal asked Henry if he was interesting in managing the club. Henry retreated. “No, no, no,” he replied. “I’m not interested in managing this club, or any other.” Hyland went with the story and the rest of the press followed.

  IT WON’T BE HANK254

  The job of replacing deposed Eddie Mathews as manager of the Braves is still up for grabs…. People are asking “could it be Tommie Aaron, Hank’s brother who manages the Savannah farm club?”

  It won’t be Hank Aaron. Hank didn’t say “no” to the suggestion. He said, “No, no, no, no, no. It won’t be me. I don’t know who it will be.”

  Then Eddie Robinson, the Braves general manager, said Henry was not a candidate for the job, and neither was Tommie, and that was when Henry began to boil. When Hyland and Wayne Minshew asked Robinson if he believed Atlanta was ready for a black manager, Robinson demurred with a terse “I’m not prepared to answer that. No comment.” Two days later, Henry Aaron, batting .235, with ten home runs, flew to Pittsburgh for the All-Star Game, his twentieth consecutive one. He was voted in as a starter and shook hands with his teammates, but the game on the field was only part of the story. Baseball, commissioner Bowie Kuhn in particular, was under fire from the Pittsburgh chapter of the NAACP and the Catholic Interracial Council. The two organizations had joined forces to criticize baseball’s failure to hire a black manager, with three days of protest leading up to the game. As the new home-run king, Henry smiled as a goodwill ambassador, but he was furious that neither he nor his brother had been taken seriously by Robinson as managerial material. While the NAACP protested in Pittsburgh, Robinson was making his own deal in Atlanta: Clyde King, a baseball lifer, had the job.

  When the game commenced, Henry took two uninspired at bats against his old nemesis Gaylord Perry—a weak pop to left and a grounder to first—before being replaced by César Cedeño. Some of the old faces remained—Frank Robinson, Pete Rose, and Joe Morgan—but Robinson remained the only other player in the game who, like Henry, had begun his career in the 1950s. The changes were obvious, from the soft cuts he took in the game to the new generations of stars on both sides—Rollie Fingers, Mike Schmidt, Bobby Grich—suggesting that maybe it might be time to let someone else put on the spikes.

  “It’s an honor,” he later told Dusty Baker privately. “But I don’t belong here anymore.”

  Almost immediately after despairing, Henry tried once more to pull himself up off the mat, giving in to will.

  “The way I saw it,255 I had three options: hang on past my prime, do some hitting, or retire,” he recalled in I Had a Hammer. “The option I preferred was number two.”

  When the game ended, Henry Aaron, white-hot, gave a nationally televised interview to Tony Kubek of NBC, where his frustration welled up into a supernova.

  “I think they owe me the courtesy of asking me,”256 Henry told Kubek, speaking of the managerial job. “I believe I deserved to be asked if I wanted it,” he said. “And if they offered it to me, I would have taken it because there are no black managers.”

  The next day, above the news of Greece and Cypress and the Nixon impeachment and school desegregation stood Henry, above the fold, page 1A of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

  RHUBARB!257

  Aaron Reverses Field …

  But Braves Name King to Manage

  PITTSBURGH—Clyde King … will be named manager of the Atlanta Braves … but Henry Aaron said he would have taken the job if asked….

  “I still prefer not to manage,” Aaron replied, “but it is time he had a black manager in the major leagues.” …

  “I think Robinson should have at least had the courtesy to ask me if I was interested.”

  Over the next three days, Henry boiled, at the present and the past, at all that had been said and quite likely all that he had not said over the years. On Thursday, July 25, Jesse Outlar further steamed Henry with his insinuation in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Henry was nothing more than a puppet for black leaders.

  PRESSURE FROM INFLUENTIAL BLACKS

  LIES BEHIND AARON’S ABOUT-FACE

  Henry Aaron obviously has agreed to become the Jackie Robinson of the major league dugout. He is taking the lead to change the times in baseball, even if he has to manage, something he has always vowed he did not want to do….

  Robinson broke the color line in baseball in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Now influential black leaders such as Jesse Jackson apparently have persuaded Aaron that he is the man to end the managerial boycott. That’s the only logical explanation of Aaron’s sudden about face….

  The next day came the ground war—an omitted word in Jesse Outlar’s column headline transformed AARON SAYS HE HAS NOT CHANGED, BUT HE’S STILL OWN MAN to AARON SAYS HE HAS CHANGED, BUT HE’S STILL OWN MAN—followed by the atom bomb: a photo accompanyi
ng Outlar’s column of a cheering Billye, with the caption “Wife Billye: Trouble?”

  That did it. He could take being called Stepin Fetchit by Furman Bisher, and a pawn by Jesse Outlar, and being left out in the cold by management, which lauded his contributions to the organization but did not seem to think enough of him to ask him if he was even interested in managing the club before announcing to the world he wasn’t being considered, but putting Billye on the front page of the sports section was just the low blow required to set Henry Aaron aflame. It was also the second time Henry had seen Billye become the target. The first was months earlier, on opening day in Cincinnati, when the Reds refused his request to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., with a moment of silence. The whispers had started then, that it was Billye who was planting ideas in Henry’s uncomplicated brain, that Henry had been just the nicest fellow until he married her. Now her picture was in the newspaper, adjacent to a story about him with an erroneous headline.

  The cutline infuriated Henry, but it only represented a flash point. He had already been seeing red for a week. The Outlar story contained a damaging piece of fiction, one that had been voiced before and that Henry could never live down. The article suggested he did not possess the intelligence to comprehend the scope of his own struggle, whether it be the civil rights movement or the necessity for the next level of integration in his own sport, and that he needed his wife to put ideas in his head.

  It all came to a head later that night, Farmer’s Night at Atlanta Stadium, a quaint tradition since the Braves had first arrived in Atlanta. Each player received a carton of produce and the local farmers were celebrated in a pregame ceremony. The game with the Padres was being delayed, and while the tarp still covered the infield, Garr and Baker both told Frank Hyland to steer clear of Henry, which piqued the reporter’s curiosity. Henry wanted a piece of Hyland, too, for Hyland had written that Henry had “double-talked,” either to the Braves about not wanting to manage or in the NBC interview about his newfound interest. Either way, Hyland wrote, the organization could not be blamed for Henry’s indecision. Henry saw Hyland and motioned for him to come to his locker. Ron Reed, the six-foot-six former basketball player, and Henry’s pal Paul Casanova stood, Dusty Baker recalled, “like bouncers about to break up a bar fight.”258 For a moment, it appeared the two were speaking civilly, and then Henry, for the first time in his career, lost it, letting Frank Hyland have it: a carton of strawberries to the face.